Part 4 (2/2)
”The hospital, the old Jew, the garage and the hotel have phones,” Shabalala said. ”The post office has a machine for telegrams.”
Emmanuel swallowed the remainder of his tea. Two phone calls that he knew of had gone out regarding the murder. One to van Niekerk, who'd sooner eat horse s.h.i.+t than call in the Security Branch, the other to Paul Pretorius of army intelligence. It was time to go direct to the source, the family home, and find out what information it yielded.
”I'll go and pay my respects to the widow,” Emmanuel said. ”Is the captain's house far from here?”
”No.” Shabalala opened the back door and allowed him to enter first. ”You must walk to the petrol station and then go right onto van Riebeeck Street. It is the white house with many flowers.”
Emmanuel pictured a fence made from wagon wheels and a wrought-iron gate decorated with migrating springbok. The house itself probably had a name like Die Groot Trek, the Great Trek, spelled out above the doorway. True Boers didn't need good taste; they had G.o.d on their side.
The late-afternoon sun began to wane and blue shadows fell across the flat strip of the main street. The handful of shops sustained themselves with a trickle of holidaymakers on their way to the beaches of Mozambique and the wilds of the Kruger National Park. There was OK Bazaar for floral dresses, plain s.h.i.+rts and school uniforms, all in sensible cotton. Donny's All Goods, for everything from single cigarettes to Lady Fair sewing patterns. Kloppers for Bata shoes and farm boots. Moira's Hairstyles, closed for the day. Then, on the corner, stood Pretorius Farm Supply behind a wire fence.
A handwritten sign was tied to the mesh: ”Closed due to unforeseen circ.u.mstances.” Unforeseen. That was probably the simplest way to get a handle on the murder of your father. Inside the compound a black watchman paced the front of the large supply warehouse while an Alsatian dog, chained to a spike in the ground, ran restless circles of its territory.
Across a small side street was the garage Shabalala had told him about. The sign above the three petrol pumps read ”Pretorius Petrol and Garage.” It was open, manned by an old coloured man in grease-covered overalls probably called in at short notice to supervise the black teenagers operating the pumps. Why wasn't the town called Pretoriusburg? The family owned a big enough slice of it.
Emmanuel turned right onto van Riebeeck Street. The neat country houses with manicured beds of aloe and flowering protea had a deserted air. Garden boys, now usually finis.h.i.+ng up for the day, were nowhere in sight. Dried laundry flapped on backyard lines. No maids. No ”missus” or ”baas,” either.
The news was out, he guessed. A quick glance down van Riebeeck confirmed it. A group of the captain's neighbors was gathered in front of a house at the end of the street. Housemaids and garden boys, many of them gray haired despite the t.i.tle, stood in a group two dwellings down: close enough to look on yet far enough to show respect.
A woman's sob floated out into the afternoon. Emmanuel approached a wide gravel driveway choked with cars. An elegant Cape Dutchstyle house nestled in an established garden. A dark thatched roof perched over graceful gables and gleaming whitewashed walls. Wooden shutters, the exact shade of the thatch, were shut against the world. A long veranda, decorated with flowerpots, ran the length of the house. There wasn't a wagon wheel in sight.
Like the captain's hand-tooled watch, the house was a surprise. Where was the bleached antelope skull he expected to find nailed over the doorway? He stepped past the front b.u.mper of a dusty Mercedes and into the garden.
”Hey! Who you?” A hand settled on his shoulder and stayed there. A skinny white man with watery blue eyes stared him down. The crowd turned to examine the interloper.
”I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper.” He flicked his ID open and held it uncomfortably close to the man's face. ”I'm the investigating officer in this case. Are you a family member?”
The hand dropped. ”No. Just making sure we all act decent toward Captain Pretorius and his family.”
Emmanuel returned his ID to his pocket and smiled to show there were no hard feelings.
”He's okay, Athol. Let him by.” Hansie stood on the veranda in his filthy uniform, cheeks glowing an eggsh.e.l.l pink. Exercising his authority in public agreed with him.
”This way, Detective Sergeant.” Hansie waved him across the garden flushed with early spring color, and up the stairs that led to the imposing front door. Emmanuel took off his hat.
”I've come to pay my respects to Mrs. Pretorius. The family all here?”
”Everyone except Paul.” Hansie opened the front door and ushered him in. ”Mrs. Pretorius and her daughters-in-law are seeing to the captain. The rest are out on the back veranda.”
They entered a small receiving area that led farther along to a series of closed doors, most likely the bedrooms. Hansie walked left into a large room dominated by heavy wooden furniture, the kind built to withstand generations of pounding by unruly boys and leather-skinned men. The polished tile floor was smooth as snakeskin under the yellow light of the gla.s.s-faced lanterns. An enormous sideboard covered in trophies and framed photos ran along one side of the room.
The photographs covered several generations of the Pretorius clan. There was a girl in ponytails playing in the snow, then a dour-faced clergyman surrounded by an army of equally humorless children. The next photo showed a young Captain Pretorius and a pretty woman in her twenties seated on a park bench. Then an image stopped Emmanuel in his tracks. The Pretorius boys, ranging in age from five to fifteen, stood shoulder to shoulder in their Voortrekker Scout uniforms. It was night and their faces and uniforms gleamed in the light of the flaming torches held high in their hands. Their eyes stared out at him, hard with Afrikaner pride. Emmanuel thought of Nuremberg: all those rosy-cheeked German boys marching toward defeat.
”The Great Trek celebration,” Hansie said. ”Captain and Mrs. Pretorius took us Voortrekker Scouts on a trip to Pretoria for the ceremony. We got to throw the torches into a huge fire.”
Emmanuel remembered his own trip to the same celebration well. He remembered the heat of the flames breathing onto his face and the uncomfortable feeling that he was outside the circle of those selected by G.o.d to be pure.
”I read about it in the papers,” he said, and moved on to the next photo. Paul, as big and thick necked as his brothers, in army uniform, then a Pretorius family portrait no more than a year or two old. He focused on the youngest son, who was finer boned than his brothers, with a sensitive mouth and messy blond hair that fell over his forehead. The captain and his wife had run out of brawn by the time it came to making Louis.
”An Englishman came through town with his camera and charged one pound to take a photo. We have one in our house showing me with my ma and sisters.”
They moved through to the kitchen, where two black maids laid cold meat and slabs of bread onto a giant platter. A third maid, white haired and ancient, sat at the small table and sobbed in quiet bursts.
”That's Aggie,” Hansie whispered. ”She's been with the family since Henrick was a baby. She's not so good anymore, but the captain wouldn't let her go.”
They pa.s.sed a dining room dominated by a wooden table and chairs that carried a whiff of the Bavarian forest. Large windows looked out onto the vine-covered back veranda where a group of older men, rough farmers in khaki, stood together in a tight bunch.
”The fathers-in-law,” Hansie explained. They stepped out of the house and onto the veranda. Six children, from knee to shoulder height, played with a wooden spinning top that wobbled and bounced between them. A young black girl rocked a fat white baby on her knee. The Pretorius brothers held their own council out on the garden lawn. All except Louis.
Emmanuel approached them. Erich started straight in.
”Hansie here says it was the old Jew who looked Pa over. How's that?”
”Checked his papers myself. Everything was in order. He was qualified to conduct the examination.”
He waited for angry denials, but none came. The brothers stared back at him, expressions unchanged.
”Pa was right.” Henrick's speech was a beat too slow, thanks to an afternoon of steady drinking. ”He always said the old Jew had something to hide.”
”s.h.i.+fty,” Erich threw in. ”Who else but the old Jew would lie about something like that, hey? Probably doesn't know how to tell the truth. No practice.”
The Pretorius brothers were halfway to being wrecked, and in no hurry to slow the ride.
”Did your father and the old Jew have a disagreement lately?”
”Not for a while,” Henrick said. ”Pa went to see him a couple of times this past year just to talk to him about how things work here in Jacob's Rest. Give him guidelines, like. To keep him clear of trouble.”
”Good of him,” Emmanuel said mildly, recalling Zweigman's comment about the captain dropping in for a ”friendly chat.” ”You think the old Jew resented your father's help?”
Henrick shrugged. ”Maybe.”
”Enough to kill him over?” Emmanuel plowed ahead, exploiting the brothers' relaxed state of mind. Sober, it was hard to find a wedge into them.
Erich snorted. ”Him, kill my pa?”
”The old Jew's scared of guns,” Henrick explained. ”Won't touch them. Won't even sell bullets from his shop.”
”He couldn't strangle a chicken without help,” Johannes said.
”Couldn't p.i.s.s on a fire without his wife aiming it for him,” Erich added with a mean-spirited giggle that set the brothers laughing.
Emmanuel let the laughter subside. In a few hours, when the whiskey bravado had worn off, they'd feel the full weight of their father's murder, and remember that the killer still walked free among them.
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